The demand for increasingly sophisticated graphic-intensive games and rich multimedia applications is driving a steady growth in computing power. This trend is reflected in the popularity of multiprocessor architectures, in which an operating system manages different threads (streams of instructions) in parallel on multiple processors.
It will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration, elements shown in the figures have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements may be exaggerated relative to other elements for clarity.